Flash Fiction ish: Excerpt From My NaNoWriMo Novel

This is an excerpt from the book I’ve been editing the last few months, “Gold Valley”. Obviously it’s not a finished product, but I wanted to share with you what I’ve been working on.

Hope it makes sense!

Journal – Adam

I didn’t dream about Him again, last night. I thought I would – he’d been visiting me so often, reminding me of my debt. But he wasn’t there.

I fell for a long, long time before I landed, and even then it remained pitch black. My footsteps didn’t echo at all – it felt like I had ended up in a vortex of some kind, like I’d been vacuumed into the darkness and was now trapped. But then there was light, dim but there, pulsating. I saw her a ways off, and she wasn’t wearing dirty leather boots and military issue coat. Her face was no longer scarred, the line that slashes straight through her eyebrow was gone. Her hair was down and she was wearing a white dress, the same dress she was wearing the last time I’d seen her, and she was smiling.

God, she had a beautiful smile.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked me, voice full of light.

“I’m…looking for you,” I said. She pouted.

“You’re lying.”

“Have you….always been like this?” I asked her, confused. Maybe this was an image I had created, a remnant of an earlier dream. But for me, she had always been like this. The day I left, she’d worn white, and I’d taken her to our favorite spot, by the crossroads, and I remember she accidentally got mud on the skirt. She was so upset. We were both naive then – days after the Apocalypse and here we were, traipsing down an open road with no cares.

She had complained about it, the mud stain, like it was this big chore to deal with. I remembered thinking it was stupid, but didn’t say anything. Ava doesn’t care about mud anymore.

But this was the old vision of her, the one I’d kept close by for when I needed it.

“Yes,” she said, answering too late.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes.

“There’s Isaac,” she said, pointing behind me. I turned around and indeed, there he was, 21 years old and a head full of hair. He used to keep it so long. Now he’d cut it, close to his scalp, and I thought it was so strange. No, this, this image before, that was the one I remembered.

“Hello, Brother,” Isaac said, standing several feet away. I waved.

“What are you doing here?”

“He brought us,” Isaac replied.

“Who?”

“You know who,” he said, raising an eyebrow at me, and I felt a chill crawl through my body. So He was here after all.

And so I heard it after Isaac spoke – the low growl of hunger that I’d grown to know so well, and hate and fear. I turned around, to Ava, and somehow she had moved away from me, so she was no longer within reach. I was in between them, perfectly balanced.

Someone's gonna get eaten...

So the Hungry came, emerging from the darkness and surrounding the two people whom I loved, and they attacked.

“Adam!” they both cried, begging me to help them, to intervene, and I could tell, could clearly see the game – I had to choose, and could only choose one. I looked over at Ava, who no longer wore her white dress, but her dirtied boots and khaki jacket, as she fought her way through the crowd of Hungry, through the throngs of Them. She had her shotgun, the old woman’s Winchester, and an unnatural number of shots, and she was killing them with such ease. And Isaac, with his own rifle, older, and less efficient, was fighting too.

But I had saved her already. Taken a knife in the gut. So I had already picked her, hadn’t I? But I hadn’t meant to, after all, not really. So He was asking me, wasn’t He, what I would have done, really done, if I’d had to choose?

They couldn’t fight forever, I knew that, and He knew that, and so I chose.

***

You think I'll get more hits if I keep posting pictures of Chris Evans?

I think that, when it’s published and the options are bought by a major film company, Chris Evans would be great in this movie…. : D